A Conversation with Linus Torvalds

A celebration of Linux's 20th birthday wouldn't be complete without an appearance from Linux creator Linus Torvalds. While Torvalds is famously reluctant to speak, he did take the stage at LinuxCon North America 2011 for a conversation with Greg Kroah-Hartman.

Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-HartmanJim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, introduced Torvalds and "his junior apprentice" Kroah-Hartman for an informal discussion. They started with a discussion about the 3.0 numbering, and Torvalds mentioned (again) that the reason had nothing to do with features and everything to do with numbering.

"I think I will call 3.11 Linux for Workgroups."

Next, Kroah-Hartman asked about anything in the past year that Torvalds found interesting. Surprisingly, Torvalds replied that he "doesn't get that involved in development" but spends his time guiding the process. "I end up being pretty far removed from the day to day development. Most of the code I write... is in the email saying 'this is the approach I'd like to see... very few commits of mine make it into the kernel."